TORONTO — The revolution was indeed twittered, as many have long expected. But Twitter did not cause the revolution.

As scholars and journalists alike continue to extol the pivotal role of social networks in the recent Arab Spring of popular uprisings across the Middle East, a panel of experts gathered in a conference room in downtown Toronto on Thursday evening to try and put that role in perspective.

The overwhelming consensus was that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter were facilitators of recent events in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and elsewhere in the region.

What they were not, however, were instigators.

“Social media is not a panacea, I don’t believe it can cause a revolution,” Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the packed conference room in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“But it can assist one with efficiency.”

Since the headlines began pouring in following the first wave of protests in Egypt on January 25, some have already tempered the rush to credit Facebook and Twitter as the champions of freedom in a heavily repressed region.

But so-called “techno-utopians” — as author Evgeny Morozov calls those who blindly believe in the democratizing power of the Internet — refute those arguments.

Those critics would usually point to dramatic case studies such as Wael Ghonim, the Google Inc. executive who was temporarily imprisoned by Egyptian authorities for his role in organizing demonstrations on Facebook.

In early February, he told his followers on Twitter that he would no longer communicate with them through traditional media, opting instead to send messages solely through the Facebook page he created.

After being released on February 8, Mr. Ghonim was given the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his efforts just last week. The honour served to solidify the supreme importance of social networks in fomenting modern dissent in the minds of many.

But those critics need to look at the larger forces which had been at play in the region since ‘twitter’ still referred to a sound a bird made.

“The Arab uprisings were not as spontaneous as everyone has been led to believe,” said the journalist for National Public Radio (NPR) and operator of the Twitter feed @feb17voices. She was rumoured to have been arrested in Cairo while covering ongoing events in Egypt early last month (rumours she later put to rest).

“The Egyptian organizers had been planning it for years, they even went to Europe to train,” Ms. Abdurrahman said.

All other arguments aside, social media quite simply does not have the penetration necessary in those countries to reach a significant percentage of the population. Less than one in four Egyptians have access to the Internet. In Tunisia the figure is higher — close to one third — but still not enough to spread a widespread message of popular dissent.

“There is still a huge chunk of people who are not online and so [social media] can only go so far,” said Ms. Abdurrahman.

“Word of mouth is still very strong.”

One can see how little the revolutionary process has changed over decades, despite the recent rise of the social Web. Harken back to Europe in 1848, or to Africa in the 1960s, and you will find examples of revolutions that seemed to move with a “magical interconnect,” noted Brian Stewart.

“There, word was spread through pamphlets and at church meetings,” said the senior Munk Centre fellow and veteran foreign correspondent (he was introduced as the “godfather” of foreign correspondents by the Munk Centre’s Rob Steiner).

“People have always found a way at various points in history to get things off the ground.”

All of this is not to suggest social networking and Web-based communities do not have an extremely important role to play in growing and sustaining a democracy. There is even a fascinating project led by mostly Canadian scholars and diplomats in Egypt right now called Cloud to Street designed to support grassroots political activity online.

Rather, it is intended to provide some badly needed perspective during a time of democratic awakening in arguably the world’s most volatile region. After all, as Ms. York noted, the “strongest impact” of social media in the Arab Spring was simply “allowing the world to witness each event.”

Those events were conceived of and carried out by people, not by the tools they used.